Chapter 369: 2021 Bahrain Pre-Season Test II

"The thing is, Red Bull is trying to chase the high they had when Verstappen delivered immediately after being promoted and was able to be closer to Ricciardo almost immediately and sometimes even outperform him, which many speculate is the reason he left Red Bull, as the team seemed to be favoring Verstappen. But the problem is that they are not giving these drivers enough time to acclimate to the sport before immediately putting them on the hot seat and demoting them the moment they don’t live up to expectations. They did that with Gasly after only 12 races and were lenient with Albon, giving him a season and a half, when one of those drivers started delivering very consistently when he was on the sister team under lesser pressure."

"Do you think them bringing in Perez is them acknowledging that their way of things is not working?"

"Not really. Seeing as how they are immediately promoting their junior driver the moment he is of age and having tried to bring him into the grid when he was still fifteen, they seem to think it is not a methodology problem but a driver’s inability to adapt to that methodology, and they believe the junior is the perfect specimen to act as proof of that. Given that Perez has been given only a single year in his contract, many might see that as a placeholder contract that is up for negotiation depending on how the junior performs."

"Fatih Yıldırım, the man who has won everything," Alex Jacques said, and the TV director, tuning in to the commentary, immediately changed the feed to show Fatih Yıldırım in the yellow team kit, talking with James, his race engineer to be on his debut, as they stood in front of a data screen.

"What I’m worried about is them prematurely promoting him the moment he shows promise on the sister team and putting him under pressure to perform, which might cause his performance to drop."

"But for Gasly, he is going to want to outperform him to have any chance of returning to that sister team, and with his first race expected to be in the Principality of Monaco where there is no room for mistakes, it is the perfect track for the experienced driver to outperform the new rookie."

"Why do you sound confident that it will be Gasly remaining and not Yuki?"

"The chances of Yuki outperforming Gasly are very low since he has been in F1 for a while, while the other is still yet to get in the car."

"But from the aero use and the updates over their previous car, this car can be considered to be a completely new one. Doesn’t that level the playing field?"

"Not really, since the other one already knows what an F1 car feels like, so the only thing he has to do is recalibrate from a known point, while for Yuki, he is starting from scratch, which might be an advantage, but that is only when time is given, and he doesn’t have that much of it to show his performance."

"But did AlphaTauri make it clear what is going to happen to the demoted driver if Fatih underperforms, or is he there for the rest of the season? And do we see chances of a mid-season promotion?"

"I don’t think they are going to rattle the nest on the main team anytime soon, but considering he is the driver they wanted to be in the driver’s seat from the beginning of the season and only had to compromise due to the minimum age requirement, I don’t think the demoted reserve driver is going to have any chance back in the car since they will be more patient with him than these two.

But with Red Bull, other than Verstappen, Horner, and Helmut, everything else can be moved if it doesn’t live up to expectations, and it seems like they have higher expectations for Fatih than they have with Yuki, so even with the same performance between the two, they will be more disappointed in Fatih than they will be with Yuki."

"Coming back to the new car part of things, as a sister team and a team specifically responsible for nurturing drivers for the Red Bull team, aren’t the changes made too many when they usually aspired to provide a very stable platform for drivers to learn from? These changes have brought the car to a similar design language to Red Bull, which we know is very sensitive and requires a specific type of driving to extract all of the pace."

"These changes were expected, considering they have moved to the new wind tunnel last season, but until we see the long-race practice, we won’t know if it carries the same problems or if they improved it within their design philosophy...."

...

As the two commentators had their back-and-forth conversation, talking about the mess that AlphaTauri and Red Bull are going to be in this season, Fatih was currently fully engrossed in the data screen in front of him.

"We are finally here," he said to himself as he adjusted his mask to sit more comfortably, since it was still mandated due to the still-prevalent COVID-19.

If he was wearing his racing suit, the body data gathered from the gloves would have made anyone seeing it think he was in the middle of a race, based on how fast his heart was beating from the excitement he was feeling.

He had dreamed many times in his past life and toiled for years in this life, and finally, he was inside the team garage as one of the engineers.

Due to being underage and yet to meet all of the requirements to have his super license, the team couldn’t categorize him as a driver. Had they given him a pass like one of their VIPs, he would have been banned from entering the garage and limited to the partition at the rear. So, to make sure he was able to enter the garage, get used to how things work, access live telemetry, and be able to converse with the drivers and more, they had classified him as an engineering intern to justify not paying him and not eating into their cost-cap budget.

For the team, it was just a good workaround, but for Fatih, it was the perfect place to be, and it was paying dividends immediately since he was finally able to register the car in the simulation, as it was the first time it was fully assembled and he was present.

He calmed himself down as he tried to focus on the data that was being displayed on the screen in front of him while listening to the chatter in the team’s radio channels.

He was living his dream and felt a step closer to it with every second he spent in the garage.